The First Clash: The Miraculous Greek Victory at Marathon and Its Impact on Western Civilization

by Jim Lacey

  With Fravartish defeated, Darius sent assistance to his father in Parthia, while he advanced with the bulk of his army into Armenia. At his approach, the dispirited Armenians, who had already suffered severely at the hands of Darius’s generals, put aside their weapons and returned to the Persian fold. Darius, believing that there was only some mopping up left to do, began his march back to the heart of the empire. He reached Arbela in late July 521 BC. Here he rested his army, as messengers arrived to announce that everywhere his loyal satraps were victorious over the remaining rebel forces.11 Inexplicably, Babylon, unable to accept that Darius was everywhere victorious, revolted one more time. This time the people followed an Armenian named Arakha, who also styled himself as a new Nebuchadnezzar. As there was still much work to be done after the grim fighting throughout the northern provinces of his empire, Darius could not immediately march on Babylon. Instead he sent Intaphrenes, one of his co-conspirators in seizing the throne, against Babylon. Intaphrenes led a Persian army south and captured the city without much fighting on November 27, 521 BC. As usual, Darius ordered Arakha and all of his chief followers mutilated and impaled.

  The main fighting was now over. It had been a brutal year, but at its end Darius reigned supreme. As he inscribed for future generations, he had fought nineteen battles and overthrown nine kings.12 But still the fighting was not over. The Scythians, who were always looking for weakness within the empire to launch further devastating raids, had intervened on the side of Darius’s enemies during the main fighting and were now restless. Like Cyrus before him, Darius could not leave the northern portions of his empire, already weakened by over a year of vicious fighting, at the mercy of these pitiless hordes. He therefore led his veterans north into modern Turkistan. In a novel maneuver, Darius boarded a large portion of his army on ships gathered along the Caspian Sea and launched an amphibious assault in the rear of the Scythians. Taken by surprise, the bulk of the Scythian army was either destroyed or captured. For the first time in generations the northern frontier of the empire was secure, while the Persians added the province of Saka to the empire. With this addition, the Saka cavalry, the finest light and heavy cavalry in the world, was now at Darius’s disposal. This cavalry was later to play a major but mostly unrecognized role at the Battle of Marathon.

  There was just one more matter to settle before Darius felt himself secure on the throne. The satrap controlling Lydia and Ionia, Oroites, remained neutral during Darius’s time of troubles. In fact, he took advantage of the turmoil to add to the territory under his control and had executed several high-ranking Persians, even murdering one of Darius’s personal messengers. While he was fighting the rebels, Darius could do nothing to avenge such slights. Furthermore, even after he was victorious on all fronts, Darius remained reluctant to march directly on Oroites, who Herodotus states “possessed great political and military strength, including 1,000 elite Persian troops.”

  It was on these Persian troops that Darius placed his hopes for a quick resolution. According to Herodotus, Darius sent a royal messenger to Oroites’ court to deliver a series of proclamations. The Great King ordered his messenger to watch the reaction of the guards to each proclamation and determine whether their loyalty was to Oroites or Darius. When the messenger noted that the Persian soldiers were reacting to each royal pronouncement with respect verging on awe, he dared to have read aloud one of two final messages: “Persians, King Darius forbids you to serve as guards to Oroites.” Upon hearing this, the guards immediately stood easy and let down their spears. Emboldened by the guards’ reaction, the messenger handed over one last proclamation for reading: “King Darius instructs the Persians in Sardis to kill Oroites.” After this dispatch was read aloud, the guards drew their daggers and slew Oroites.13

  By 518 BC, almost three decades before the Battle of Marathon, Darius was the undisputed master of the Persian Empire. But it still remained an empire in name only, consisting mostly of a hodgepodge of nations held together by fear of Persian arms. Cyrus had begun the job of emplacing an administrative infrastructure, but it remained incomplete at his death. Moreover, his son Cambyses paid little attention to administrative matters, as he was more interested in expanding the empire and proving he was as worthy a warrior and conqueror as his father. It therefore fell to Darius to complete the consolidation and organization of the empire. He did this so thoroughly that his Achaemenid family line stayed on the throne for almost two hundred years of internal peace.14

  Chapter 6

  THE MIGHT OF PERSIA

  Almost two years of civil war had shown Darius how easily his empire could disintegrate. To forestall a recurrence, he turned his attention to creating the governmental and financial structure required to meld his fragile empire into a single, indivisible unit. It was in this regard that he displayed a particular brilliance. For if Darius was a first-class general, then he was also that rare breed of warrior who possessed a genius for administration.1

  Foremost among Darius’s priorities was the shoring up of his dynastic rights to the throne. Although he was an Achaemenid, he came from a branch of the family that was not particularly close to that of Cyrus. Furthermore, if strict laws of primogeniture were adhered to, Darius’s father and not Darius himself had the stronger claim to the throne. For the time being, however, the army’s unquestioned loyalty was sufficient for Darius to hold power. But that might not be the case if a dynastic struggle erupted at a later date. So to solidify his rule, Darius turned to the first ladies of the empire. As the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, encouraged polygamy and even marrying sisters, Darius was free to marry all of them.2 Sometime in the first year of his reign, he also married Cyrus’s two daughters, Atossa and Artystone.3 Atossa bore him four sons:

  • Xerxes in 520 BC, who became the next Achaemenid king.

  • Masistes, who was one of the senior commanders in Xerxes’ doomed campaign to conquer Greece a decade after the Battle of Marathon, and satrap of the key province of Bactria.

  • Achaemenes, who became the satrap of Egypt and commanded the navy during Xerxes’ campaign against Greece in 480 BC. He was killed in 459 BC by Egyptian rebels.

  • Hystaspes, commander of the elite Bactria and Saka troops during Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.

  Darius also married Parmys, the daughter of the true Smerdis (son of Cyrus and brother of Cambyses), along with the daughter of Otanes. This last marriage was necessary to keep Otanes’ family close to the regime, as he was one of the seven who had overthrown the false Smerdis and had initially been favored by some of the others to become king. He had moved aside voluntarily so that Darius could assume the crown, and in reward Darius declared that he and his house would be subject to no man. This meant that Otanes’ family obeyed the king’s will only as they saw fit, a condition that still persisted when Herodotus wrote his history. It was therefore important to lock in the noble Otanes’ family as closely as possible to the Achaemenids and thereby ensure its loyalty and continuing support.4 With the legitimacy of his house ensured through dynastic marriages, Darius next turned his attention to consolidating the empire.

  After years of neglect and war, there was much to be done. The administrative system that linked the satrapies (provinces) to the central government was destroyed. Communications routes, on which the economy rested, were in shambles and unsafe for traders to travel. Moreover, the empire’s finances were wrecked, and there was no cash in the treasury to pay for the maintenance of the realm. Worse, although Darius had defeated his internal enemies, by doing so he had wrecked the provincial forces that had formed the backbone of the rebel armies. This left his relatively small field army as the only defenders of an empire whose expanse had no previous equal. The pressing need was to rebuild frontier fortresses and provincial forces so that they could resist the scourge of raiders from outside the empire’s borders. Accomplishing such a task demanded that Darius find large of amounts of ready cash.

  Darius did not have the luxury of dealing with each of
these problems in turn, as they were all urgent and required his immediate attention. So he turned from war and became one of the great administrators of the ancient world.5 When he was done, Darius had built such solid supports under the empire that it lasted for two hundred years without any substantial changes to its structure. While some historians have complained that this structure became ossified over time and was unable to adapt to changing circumstances, it still compares well with those of any of the other great empires known to history. For instance, the Persians did not rely on terror, as had the Assyrians, to hold subject peoples in line, nor did the empire tear itself apart in civil wars at the death of its leader, as did that of Alexander the Great. The administrative structure established by Darius was by no means perfect, but when compared with the institutions of other ancient empires, the results are consistently favorable.

  In undertaking this task, Darius acted counter to his upbringing as a warrior and forced his Persian and Median subjects to do the same. As Herodotus relates, this was not a popular direction:

  The Persians say that Darius was a retailer, Cambyses a master of slaves, and Cyrus a father. Darius tended to conduct all of his affairs as a shopkeeper, Cambyses was harsh and scornful, but Cyrus was gentle and saw to it that all things good would be theirs.6

  Although Darius built a great palace complex at Persepolis within the traditional borders of Persia, the location was not suitable as the administrative center of the empire. Darius therefore confirmed Cambyses’ selection of Susa as the empire’s capital. During the summer months, the royal court (and presumably most of the empire’s administrative infrastructure) moved two hundred miles north to the cooler Median capital of Ecbatana, which had also been the administrative center of Cyrus’s empire.

  Susa was as close to a perfectly placed city for administrative purposes as could be imagined. It sat almost equidistant from the farthest edges of the empire from east to west and was also centrally placed on the north–south axis. Moreover, it rested upon the key ancient trade routes, was situated on a fertile plain between two protecting rivers, and most important was on the edge of traditional Persian lands, the source of the empire’s strength and elite military manpower.

  Darius began by reorganizing his provinces into twenty satrapies and immediately assessed a tax on each.7 According to Herodotus, Darius received 14,560 talents in taxes from the empire on an annual basis, although this was not likely to be his only source of revenue (for instance, neither tribute from nearby nations nor imperial customs duties were included). To put this in perspective, during Darius’s reign a single talent could pay the wages for a trireme’s two-hundred-man crew for two months or the wages of three laborers for twenty years.8 As trained soldiers tended to receive a higher rate of pay than day laborers, a talent would pay the salary for a single soldier for twenty years.9 In other words, if the empire had no other expenses to pay, which was far from the case, it could pay a full-time professional force of over a quarter of a million men out of annual revenues. Two generations after Persia’s defeat at Marathon, Athens began the Peloponnesian War with 6,500 silver talents in its treasury, and annual revenues were about 1,000 talents (400 internal and 600 from tribute from other members of the empire).10 So even at the height of Athens’s power, annual revenues were approximately a fifteenth of Persia’s. It needs to be remembered that Athens did not have an empire at the time of the Battle of Marathon, nor had it yet exploited the richest veins of the Laurion silver mines. An estimate of annual Athenian revenues in the years preceding Marathon should therefore be placed at under 250 talents, with only a percentage of that available for war. This was approximately a fiftieth of Persia’s revenues.

  Within Persia, this massive transfer of wealth to the center did not represent the full tax burden on the peoples of the empire. As none of these tax receipts were typically transferred back to the provinces, the local satraps collected additional revenues to pay for their own upkeep, infrastructure projects, and defense. This last obligation likely amounted to a sizable sum, as many of the satrapies had hostile neighbors on their borders and were expected to see to their own defense against all but the strongest attacks. However, the tax burden did not end there. In addition to the satraps, there were a large number of subsatraps, regional governors, and other administrators who collected taxes to pay for their own maintenance, which was often extravagant. For instance, the subsatrap for Judah during this time fed 150 of his officers from his own table every day.11 But even this was not the end. All levels of the Persian government also collected taxes in kind, and tens of thousands of sheep, mules, and horses and tons of foodstuffs, incense, ebony, and ivory were taken by the tax collectors every year.

  All of this constituted an enormous burden on the empire’s economy. It would not have been so bad if the government had spent the money or found some other way to keep these funds in circulation. However, it would be two thousand years before Britain discovered that it was better economically to keep its specie in circulation to grow the economy and still have it available through taxes and loans in an emergency. Prior to this, every good ruler tried to store as much bullion as possible in his treasury as insurance in the event of war or bad times. The Persians proved to be masters of the art of hoarding. This would be plainly demonstrated after Alexander brought the empire crashing down: Reportedly, after the Macedonians captured the Persian royal treasuries, Alexander seized almost 200,000 talents in gold and silver. This must have seemed a fantastic sum for an adventurer who had begun his march of conquest with only 60 talents in his own treasury and owing 500 talents to creditors. It should be noted that this massive sum of Persian treasure was what remained after Darius III had already drawn down vast sums to pay for the war against Alexander and after he made off with 8,000 talents when he fled in the face of Alexander’s approach.

  At the beginning of Darius’s reign, the tax burden was onerous and must have built up a degree of resentment, particularly as the pretend Smerdis had promised a three-year tax holiday. However, the historical record does not indicate any trouble or rebellion over the issue. To some degree, this was because after nearly two years of war, most recognized that Darius possessed a formidable military instrument and the will to employ it ruthlessly. A more important factor, though, was that at least at the start of his reign, Darius did not hoard his tax revenues. He clearly understood that the empire was broken and that it would take lavish spending to fix it. In the beginning, this massive spending on reconstruction rehabilitated an economy broken by war.

  Darius’s first order of business was to start work on the great royal roads, which stitched his empire together. In scope, these roads were probably equal to the Roman road network at the height of that empire and were designed to serve the same purposes. Cyrus had begun the initial work on this immense construction project. To ease the workload, he directed that the roads follow already existing ancient caravan routes. However, Cyrus only began the project, and there remained much to do following his death. Cambyses made no progress in this area, and it was left to Darius to carry the work forward with a purpose.

  Herodotus provides an excellent description of just a section of the Persian road network, from Sardis to Susa, which gives us some idea of the scope of the endeavor and its critical role in holding the empire together. According to Herodotus, it took ninety days for a man to cover the total distance of this section of the road on foot (at seventeen miles per day). At the end of each day’s journey, a traveler would find a government station with accommodations that the ancient historian rated as excellent. Along the way there were a series of guardhouses and toll posts, and at strategic locations (such as the crossing of the Halys River) there were strong fortresses garrisoned by Persian troops. In other historical sources there are references to additional arms of the road linking Susa with Bactria, India, and the Median capital (Ecbatana).12

  For Darius, the royal road served two fundamental purposes. First and foremost, like the Roman road system
, the extensive network greatly eased the job of moving the Persian army to any threatened frontier or to any satrapy that dared raise the banner of revolt. Its other purpose was to increase the span of royal control by reducing the communication time between various points of the empire. Herodotus even describes the equivalent of a Persian Pony Express, where way stations with fresh mounts were spaced a day’s ride apart, and messengers handed off their dispatches to the next rider at the end of each day. As Herodotus states, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swiftly as possible.”13 Through this post system, Darius was able to send messages from his capital to the governor of any satrapy in a week or less, a phenomenal speed for the time. As others throughout the empire began to use the roads to send messages, Darius instituted a reporting system along the network. Royal inspectors monitored road traffic and read every note being sent within the empire. Regular reports were then sent to Darius detailing the correspondence of every important person in the empire (unimportant people were predictably not allowed to use the post service).

  Herodotus further relates a probably apocryphal story of how far some individuals would go to sneak a message past the inspectors. Histiaios, who will play a considerable role later in this book, shaved the head of a loyal slave and tattooed the order to start the Ionian revolt on the bald pate. Once the hair grew back enough to cover the instructions, the messenger was sent on his way.

  Darius also lavished money on building a new ornamental capital at Persepolis, as well as on building and beautifying monumental structures throughout that city. He also underwrote monumental buildings in many of the empire’s other great cities and throughout the satrapies, including construction projects such as an early Suez Canal.14 In an early proof of Keynesian economic theory, this government spending propelled the empire’s moribund economy into overdrive. Economic growth was further boosted by a renewed and flourishing trading regime, as merchants took advantage of the general peace, the construction of secure new roads, and investments in port facilities to move their wares where they could be sold at the greatest profit. In no small measure, Darius bought the stability of his empire through massive expenditures of government funds. By keeping most of the empire’s specie in circulation and continually adding more from the royal mints, he made it possible for every region of the empire to enjoy a spell of unparalleled prosperity.